In
December 1992, the 16th century mosque built by the Mogul Emperor
Babur was demolished by Hindu fanatics, reminding us that India, which
would like to be a secular state, has always been a religious battleground.
It was the most publicised victory for the new wave of Hindu fundamentalism,
and history made way for myths old and new. Here’s a fresh look at Babur
-- poet, warrior and founder of the Mogul dynasty -- beyond the mundane
realm of praise and blame

The
Baburnama, the autobiography of India’s first Mogul emperor, Zahiruddin
Mohammad Babur (1483 -1530), is one of the true marvels of the medieval
world. It belongs with that tiny handful of the world’s literary works
that can accurately be described as unique: that is without precedent
and without imitators.

In
the western tradition the military memoir has a pedigree that goes back
to Xenophon and Julius Caesar. Babur had no such precedents available:
indeed as Wheeler M. Thackston, The Baburnama’s most recent translator
notes: "Babur’s memoirs are the first - and until relatively recent
times, the only - true autobiography in Islamic literature."

In
other words, in setting out to write an autobiography, Babur did something
that very few writers have ever done. He invented a form out of whole
cloth: his true literary peers, in this sense, are such epochal figures
as Lady Murasaki and Cervantes. Yet Babur was also the founder of a great
empire: in other words he was both a Caesar and a Cervantes.

What
made him pen this immense book (382 folio pages in the original Turkish)
and how on earth did he find the time? Between the moment when he gained
his first kingdom at the age of 12 and his death 35 years later, there
seems scarcely to have been a quiet day in Babur’s life. His first kingdom
was the only one he didn’t have to risk his life for: he inherited it
from his father, a scion of a dynasty that was far richer in aspiring
rulers than in thrones.

Babur
took a matter-of-fact view of his father: "He was short in stature,
had a round beard and a fleshy face, and was fat... He used to drink a
lot.

Later
in life he held drinking parties once or twice a week. He was fun to be
with in a gathering and was good at reciting poetry for his companions.
He grew rather fond of ma’jun (a narcotic) and under its influence
would lose his head. He was of a scrappy temperament and had many scars
and brands to show for it."

Although
scarcely a model parent, Babur’s father, Umar-Shaykh Mirza, was the very
soul of docility compared to the rest of his family. More or lessthe
first thought that occurred to Babur on hearing of his father’s death
was
to flee to the mountains so that "at least I would not fall captive...
to one of my uncles." Of one of his uncles Babur writes: "He
never missed the five daily prayers, even when he was drinking... He was
a good drinker. Once he started drinking, he drank continually for twenty
or thirty days, but when he stopped he did not drink again for the same
amount of time." Of another: "He was addicted to vice and debauchery.
He drank wine continually. He kept a lot of catamites, and in his realm
wherever there was a comely, beardless youth, he did everything he could
to turn him into a catamite."

Predictably,
Babur’s uncles and cousins attacked his territories soon after he had
acceded to the throne. Not to be outdone, Babur counter-attacked. At the
age of 13 he led an army to Samarkand, to join a clutch of cousins and
second-cousins who were taking advantage of another relative’s absence
to lay siege to the fabled city.

After
a siege of seven months Babur succeeded in having himself crowned the
ruler of Samarkand. He was to rule the city for no more than a hundred
days but in many ways this was the defining moment of Babur’s life. He
was to besiege, conquer and lose Samarkand many times over before he was
finally and decisively driven southward. But up to the end of his life,
even when he had conquered a realm far vaster, richer and more promising
than those that had been taken from him, he still pined for his lost city:
for Babur Samarkand was the epitome of civilisation, the centre of the
world’s urbanity and the fountainhead of all culture. He won a sizeable
chunk of India, the land whose riches had triggered Europe’s Age of Exploration.
But to the end of his life all he really wanted was Samarkand.

Babur’s
link with Samarkand was, in the first instance, familial. His ancestor
Timur Lang ( Tamerlane 1336-1404) had made Samarkand the capital of a
vast empire and built it into a great centre of art and literature. For
Babur, as for his innumerable Timurid uncles and cousins, to rule Samarkand
was to claim succession to their glorious ancestor, the guarantor of their
own titles to rule.

The
idea of conquering empires was a part of Babur’s family heritage: he traced
his descent not just toTimur
Lang, but also to Genghis Khan (1167-1227). The story of his kingdom-seeking
adolescence and youth has its genesis ultimately in that epochal churning
of peoples and cultures that was set in motion by Genghis Khan in the
13th century.

Genghis
Khan’s descendants evidently inherited his remarkable cultural and social
adaptability. In the course of his life, the old man had become increasingly
Sinicised and seems to have had little empathy for the cultures and traditions
of western Asia: certainly the Muslims and Christians of those regions
never encountered a more determined enemy. Yet within a generation or
two Genghis Khan’s descendants took on the cultural and religious (if
not linguistic) colourings of the regions they ruled. One of his grandsons,
Kubilai Khan, became emperor of China and a cornerstone of the Confucian
order, while another became the Sultan of Persia and a devout and fervent
Muslim.

Babur
traced his lineage to Genghis Khan’s second son, Chagatay. When the worlds
that Genghis Khan had conquered came to be divided amongst his progeny
Chagatay inherited Central Asia, a region in which Islam was the principal
religion and Persian the language of cultural prestige. Chagatay’s inheritance
soon fragmented into a number of warring principalities, but he bequeathed
his name not just to a realm but also to a lineage and a language - eastern
Turkish, the tongue whose greatest literary exponent Babur was to become.

Central
Asia was again briefly re-united by Timur Lang, an extra-dynastic usurper
who nonetheless thought it politic to lay claim to the legacy of the Great
Khan by marrying a Genghisid princess. His descendants, however, fought
each other with the usual courtly relish of medieval princelings. By the
time of Babur’s birth the valleys and steppes of central Asia teemed with
Timurid princes in search of realms to rule. It was a time, as E.M. Forster
observed, when ‘one could scarcely travel two miles without being held
up by an Emperor’.

Such
was the magic of the Timurid pedigree that nobody who owned it ever seems
to have forfeited the right to a throne. From the age of 12 onward Babur
(like his innumerable cousins and uncles) took it for granted that he
was born to rule. Ruling was in a sense a job, a calling, the only thing
he knew how to do and could conceive of doing. Even at times when he possessed
little more than his horse and the clothes on his back, he and the members
of his tiny entourage took it for granted that a kingdom would somehow
transpire, if not in this district then perhaps the next. It was thus,
half-reluctantly, that Babur came to be pushed into eastern Afghanistan
and eventually northern India. These were not realms of his choice, but
they were better than the prospect of unpensioned retirement.

The
instrument of Babur’s misery in his early kingdom-seeking years was a
chief called Shaybani (‘Wormwood’) Khan (1451-1510), an Uzbek and a hereditary
enemy. The wheel that Genghis Khan had put in motion had now come full
circle: just as his armies had displaced other Turco-Mongol groups, pushing
them further and further to the south and the west, so now Babur and his
cousins found themselves facing a people who had decided to create their
own moment of destiny. With the methodical precision of a cherry-picker,
Shaybani Khan picked Babur and his fellow Timurids off, one by one, driving
them steadily before him. "For nearly 140 years the capital Samarkand
had been in our family," writes Babur. "Then came the Uzbeks,
the foreign foe from God knows where, and took over."

Babur was
too close to the events to notice, of course, but there were some marvelous
symmetries to these centuries-long processes of displacement in Central
Asia; these patterns of encroachment and migration, of the sudden ascendancy
of a nation or a dynasty, of the meteoric rise and decline of glittering
cities like Bukhara and Samarkand, Ghazni and Herat. Some of these symmetries
even seeped into Babur’s own life. In much the same way as Shaybani Khan
the Uzbek was harrying Babur, Genghis Khan had once pursued a young warrior-poet,
one whose life was perhaps even more colourful than Babur’s.

The name
of the Great Khan’s prey was Jalal al-din,
and he was the heir presumptive of the great kingdom of Khwarizm, centred
in the region between the Caspian and the Aral seas. Genghis Khan had
a special grudge against the king of Khwarizm and after seizing the kingdom,
in 1220, he sent a detachment of his swiftest riders to hunt down its
ruling family. In what must count as one of the most amazing escapes in
history, the 14-year-old Jalal al-din rode without a break for 40 days,
circling through the deserts, steppes and mountains of Iran and Afghanistan,
managing somehow to stay ahead of the great Mongol general, Jebe-
known even among his fast-riding peoples
as ‘The Arrow’.

Genghis
Khan finally hunted Jalal al-din to a place from which no escape seemed
possible: a gorge above the upper Indus. But here again Jalal-al din succeeded
in evading the Khan: he spurred his horse over the cliff and into the
river, more than a hundred feet below. Legend has it that after calling
off the chase, Genghis Khan summoned his entourage and pointed to the
young prince swimming in the torrent below. "There," said Genghis
Khan, who knew about these things, "goes a brave man."

He
would have said no less for his own descendant: Babur was nothing if not
brave. On one occasion in The Baburnama, he takes on a hundred
men more or less single-handed. "Sultan-Ahmad Tambal was standing,
maintaining his position with around a hundred men... shouting, ‘Strike!
Strike!’... At that point three men were left with me... I shot an arrow
I had in my thumb ring... When I had another arrow on the string, I went
forward. The other three remained behind."

There
are times when he glimpses the end of the road. Led into a trap by an
old retainer, he writes: "Suddenly I felt odd. There is nothing worse
in the world than fear for one’s life... I felt I could endure no more.
I rose and went to a corner of the orchard. I thought to myself that whether
one lived to a hundred or a thousand in the end one had to die... I readied
myself for death." Minutes later, help arrives.

Often
he is in despair. His nineteenth year proves to be a hard one: "During
this period in Tashkent I endured much hardship and misery. I had no realm
- and no hope of any realm - to rule. Most of my liege men had departed.
The few who were left were too wretched to move about with me... Finally
I had had all I could take of homelessness and alienation. ‘With such
difficulties,’ I said to myself, ‘it would be better to go off on my own
so long as I am alive, and with such deprivation and wretchedness it would
be better for me to go off to wherever my feet will carry me, even to
the ends of the earth.’"

But
in the end, stoically, he resigns himself to the difficult business of
finding a realm: "When one has pretensions to rule and a desire for
conquest, one cannot sit back and just watch if events don’t go right
once or twice."

Eventually
his perseverance paid off. In 1504, ‘at the beginning of my twenty-third
year (when) I first put a razor to my face’, moving ever southward, staying
one step ahead of the Uzbeks, he stumbles upon the kingdom of Kabul and
decides to seize it for himself.

His
new realm was full of surprises: ‘Eleven or twelve dialects are spoken
in Kabul Province: Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Mongolian, Hindi... It is
not known if there are so many different peoples and languages in any
other province’.

Slowly,
inevitably, his attention is drawn to the vast sub-continent on the far
side of the mountains. He observes speculatively: "Four roads lead
(to Kabul) from Hindusthan". But his principal ambitions are still
directed towards the north and Samarkand. He even succeeds in taking the
city of his dreams, only to find himself expelled from it once again shortly
afterwards.

With
his northern options closed, he turns to the south.

Through
all his adventures, Babur kept writing, mainly poetry. Even while fleeing
from the Uzbeks, he found time to carve a verse on a rock beside a spring.

"Like
us many have spoken over this spring, but they were gone in the twinkling
of an eye,/We conquered the world with bravery and might, but we did not
take it with us to the grave."

It
is a commentary on our times, that to us it seems if not odd, then certainly
unexpected that a warrior and statesman should devote his attention to
intricate questions of scansion and metrics. But Babur came from a long
line of literary rulers: some of the greatest works of Persian literature
were composed in the court of his great-grandfather, Timur Lang. But his
ancestors’ literary ambitions usually stopped at connoisseurship, patronage
and upon occasion, the composing of a divan - the collection of poems
that was expected of every man of good breeding. Babur did indeed compose
collections of poems, but he was the only man of his lines to embark on
a work of extended prose. He did it moreover, not in the literary language
of his court, Persian, but in the domestic demotic of his family, Chagatay
Turkish.

To
read The Baburnama is constantly to ask oneself what could possibly
have prompted a man in Babur’s position to write his memoirs. Historically,
autobiography was not a form that flourished in Asia, certainly not in
Central Asia, where Babur’s roots lay. As for the Indian sub-continent,
I know of only one autobiography written there before the 19th
century: a brief account of the life of a merchant.

The
closest Babur comes to explaining his motives is this: "I have simply
written the truth. I do not intend by what I have written to compliment
myself: I have simply set down exactly what happened. Since I have made
it a point in this history to write the truth of every matter and to set
down no more than the reality of every event, as a consequence I have
reported every good and evil I have seen of father and brother and set
down the actuality of every fault and virtue of relative and stranger.
May the reader excuse me; may the listener take me not to task."

But
he may have come closer to the truth in his first poem, a ghazal, written
at the age of 18: "Other than my own soul I never found a faithful
friend/ Other than my own heart I never found a confidant."

It
was possibly a sense of loneliness - or rather apartness - that compelled
Babur to set down these reflections on his life; it was probably the intimacy
of that endeavor that led him to choose Turkish - his domestic language
- rather than the courtly Persian that was generally used in his circle.
Whatever the reason, the result was a memoir that was anything but a judicious
chronicle of affairs of state. Written centuries before the discovery
of the Self, The Baburnama is still, astonishingly, a narrative
of self-discovery. Its tone is disarmingly open and trusting, and in self-revelation
it yields nothing to the confessional memoir of the 1990s.

Babur
does not, for instance, neglect to record the sexual hesitancies of his
first marriage ("since it was my first marriage I was bashful, I
went to her only once every 10, 15 or 20 days"); he writes lyrically
about an adolescent infatuation with a boy ("before this experience
I had never felt a desire for anyone, nor did I listen to talk of love
and affection or speak of such things"). His estimations of his relatives
and contemporaries are so frank and unguarded as to suggest that he did
not expect his memoirs to be widely circulated.

Babur
writes no less trenchantly about women than men: as friends or adversaries
they were evidently a formidable force in his life. The women of The
Baburnama are strong-willed and independent, and they declare their
own agency without hesitation, in matters political and personal. We see
him going into the women’s quarters to ask advice at critical moments;
we read about the delinquency of a widowed aunt who gives away her son’s
kingdom to none other than the dreaded Uzbek, Shaybani Khan, in the hope
of winning his love ("in her lust to get a husband, that wretched,
feebleminded woman brought destruction on her son"); and about the
sorry end of yet another aunt who was so domineering that her husband
dared not "go to any of his other wives"; we hear of powerful
princes being swiftly dispatched by ambitious concubines; we even learn
of women who take the initiative in courting Babur. The Muslim fundamentalists
of contemporary Afghanistan would do well to read The Baburnama:
they would find that the past they want to return to is not quite what
they imagine it to be.

Babur
is at his most self-revelatory in his description of his drinking life.
Although he came from a hard-drinking line, Babur was 29 before he touched
his first drink:

"In
my childhood I had no desire for wine, for I was unaware of the enjoyment
of it. Occasionally my father had offered me some, but I had made
excuses. After my father’s death I was abstinent... Later, with the
desires of young manhood and the promptings of the carnal soul, when
I had an inclination for wine, nobody offered - no one even knew that
I was interested."

Then,
at a party in the city of Herat, in south-western Afghanistan, his
nobles arranged a party for him and offered him wine. "It crossed
my mind," writes Babur, "that since they were making such
proposals, and here we had come to a fabulous city like Herat, where
all the implements of pleasure and revelry were present, and all the
devices of entertainment and enjoyment were close at hand, if I didn’t
drink now, when would I? Deliberating thus with myself, I resolved
to make the leap."

This
was the beginning of a decades-long love affair with wine: Babur seems
to have dedicated much of his time in Afghanistan to the pursuit of wine
and ma’jun. So much for Afghan fundamentalism.

Babur
provides us with meticulous descriptions of the parties of his Kabul years.

"At
midday we rode off on an excursion, got on a boat, and drank spirits...
We drank on the boat until late that night, left the boat roaring
drunk, and got on our horses. I took a torch in my hand and, reeling
to one side and then the other, let the horse gallop free-reined along
the riverbank all the way to the camp. I must have been really drunk.
The next morning they told me that I had come galloping into camp
holding a torch. I didn’t remember a thing, except that when I got
to my tent I vomited a lot."

Amitav
Ghosh is one of the most respected names in contemporary Indian literature.
Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award and the prestigious Prix Medicis Etrangere
of France, he writes in English and lives in New York